In recent years network applications such as online gaming, online meetings, web conferencing and video conferencing have been designed. Most of these network multiuser applications are developed for personal computers connected to fix networks. However, mobile wireless devices such as personal digital assistants and mobile telephones are gaining popularity and hence the above mentioned network applications are also developed for such mobile wireless devices. For example, A. Akkawi et al., “A mobile gaming platform for the IMS”, Proceedings of the third ACM SIGCOMN workshop on network and systems support for games, Portland, USA, pages 77 to 84, 2004, proposes an architecture and platform for games on the IMS (internet protocol multimedia subsystem). Multiplayer games allow two or more players to play together or against each other in the same game. Networked multiplayer games are playable over a network, for example the internet. The communication range, speed, network coverage, bandwidth and latency, as well as parameters of the game client devices (processor, memory, graphics, etc.), have an influence on what kinds of multiplayer games can be developed and played. Usual game architectures follow one of the following approaches:
1. A central server design where the server receives stage change events from the users, recalculates the overall state and distributes the changes in the game state to the players (client-server based approach).
2. A distributor model where every player sends states directly to all the other players (peer-to-peer approach).
3. A zone server approach where some players are elected a zone servers. A zone server receives state changes of only a group of players and communicates with all the other players to propagate the game state changes (S. M. Riera et al., “A zone-based gaming architecture for ad-hoc networks”, Proceedings of the second workshop on network and system support for games, pages 72 to 76, Redwood City, USA, 2003). Ad-hoc networks consist of a group of mobile devices that communicate with each other over wireless channels. They are typically created in a spontaneous manner. A train station or a schoolyard is typical scenarios for multiplayer gaming in an ad-hoc network.
When a mobile user moves from the multicast area of one base station to the multicast area of another base station the connection between the first base station and his mobile device is torn down and the mobile device is then found by the next base station. This is also called handover and usually causes a disturbance such as a delay or jitter in the communication or transmission path, respectively. Such a disturbance may render participation in a multi-user application, such as a multiplayer real-time game, unattractive for the user due to e.g. long response times. By jitter is meant an abrupt and unwanted variation of one or more signal characteristics, such as the amplitude, phase, pulse width, pulse position, delay or latency.